By the Rivers of Kobe Part 2
From Minatogawa to Kamisawa along some Kobe riversides
Open beaked crows scattered upon my arrival in the park, the same park with the flood memorial I had been to on my previous walk along Kobe’s rivers, which you can read below:
The Inland Sea is too far to reach on day trips now, so for a while, I will wander the fringes of Kobe after work on Saturday afternoons.
At midday, the heat in the park was still as intense as full summer. But something felt different — the mornings were cooler, the cicadas had almost fallen silent, and in the evenings were replaced by the sound of the suzumushi bell cricket. The leaves of the ichou ginkgo trees now had a hint of yellow too, even the momiji maple leaves were a fraction off their full shade of green.
The pigeons took advantage of the absent crows (who had been pecking apart an old cigarette packet) to sunbathe and peck at any interesting tidbits the crows had scattered across the brick platform. At the edge of the park, above the walls, silent parasols floated by in unseen hands.
Last time, I had headed downstream from the flood monument, but this time I went upstream. The street markets of Minatogawa gave way to quiet residential streets of nineteen-sixties and seventies housing. Redevelopment was slower here, empty plots, abandoned houses, two rusting vending machines from another era.
And then, the river met the mountains. Or rather, I met the mountains. The river itself became constrained by straight concrete and carefully-set stone, having been free to make its own meandering course through the mountains.
A house perched like a castle atop a turret of stone, not the elegant white egret of Himeji Castle, but perhaps a common grey heron overlooking the river. Here I turned left, to follow the bottom of the mountains west. I was no longer following a river, but beneath the road, the sound of trickling water continued as the mountains drained under the streets. Swept down in one of the evening rainstorms was the carcass of a dreaded mukade centipede.
Then, I reached the public housing projects. The edges of Japanese cities are often not just pleasant suburbs, but also a place to put those elements of society that those in power would rather keep hidden. The blocks, which rose like walls to keep out zombies, were clean and well-maintained. They reminded me of the banlieues of Paris, but without the life and disorder, probably because they are mainly inhabited by old people.
These apartments are far from the subway, and in the small shopping centres, all the shops seemed to be closed down.
All the connections that keep a city like Kobe alive terminated abruptly at this mountain periphery — the tall pylons become a network of stumpy concrete poles, the reservoirs become piped water, and the road tunnels disgorge their cars into a myriad of small streets.
It was above one of these tunnels that I found a path crossing the mountains to the next suburb and river I was aiming for. Up I went, over the tunnel entrance and into deeper forest. A mosquito found me, and I swear the same one followed me, attacking my ear like a Stuka dive-bomber for the next thirty minutes.
Following a stream down through thick forest, I looked up to see a long-haired Scandinavian coming the other way. It was a meeting both congruous and incongruous. On the one hand, a Scandinavian looked absolutely correct hiking through a forest, on the other hand, this was a Japanese forest. We nodded awkwardly at each other, avoiding in our mutual confusion the typical Japanese greeting. At the end of the trail were two cats:
The black and white one definitely looked like a stray, a lifetime of scrapping clearly marked around his nose. The other tabby was probably a stray, judging by its frequent miaowing as I approached, that turned into a begging wariness as I came nearer.
The suburb I was approaching was the one where decapitated cats bodies had been found a few weeks earlier: link to news article here. The creepy horror of headless cats is made worse in Kobe because the killer who put a decapitated child’s head on the school gates in the nearby suburb of Suma in 1997, (a story very well told in the article below) practiced on cats first.
Was there anything unusual about this suburb? 1960s and 70s housing occupied by people in their 60s and 70s had oozed like plaster-of-paris up every nook and cranny of the lower mountainsides, before setting and slowly beginning to crumble away. Nothing really unusual, it just provided ample opportunities for cat decapitation: a stable supply of stray cats (undesirable animals, just like undesirable humans end up on the outskirts), lots of quiet places for doing the deed, and a lot of graveyards for a bit of gothic inspiration.
The newspapers had tried to obfuscate the location of the crimes, presumably to help prevent copycats (no pun intended), but one had made the mistake of giving the name of the suburb to a station, when no such station exists.
Sadly, there are an awful lot of stray cats around in Japan, and cat mutilation seems quite common, I found articles about it in almost every year in different parts of Japan while finding the link I wanted for this article.